Thanks for getting in touch with me about my new cupcake solar cooker page. I've just put the photos in, and tried to explain the process and safety as clearly as possible. Any suggestions very welcome. This is my first ever wikihow page. Regards Helen DawsonHdawsond 12:51, November 9, 2011 (UTC)

Contents

As you know, I have been doing some edits on the "Parabolic Solar Reflectors" page. I've added some information, and done some tidying, while trying not to be offensive to people who have used the page to document their own achievements and those of others.

I have also recently been doing some editing to the "Solar cooker" page on Wikipedia. If you compare them, you'll see some strong similarities between these two pages. In particular, there's a paragraph about Sheffler cookers which is identical in both. I wrote it, originally in Wikipedia, and figured it would be appropriate here too. Certainly, it is better than the one it replaced. Since everything in Wikipedia is public-domain, and also since I am the original author, I can't imagine that there will be any copyright problems.

Hi, Dowen. I saw your edits. You have improved the page greatly. Don't worry about Wikipedia. There shouldn't be a problem. We really appreciate your collaboration. We are working to get more active editors like you.

I just noticed that you're working on a piece about Fresnel Solar Cookers. (Apparently you made a post tomorrow! It's still only 2130 GMT.)

I've never tried using plastic Fresnel lenses for cooking, but I have used them for other things. They do have some drawbacks. After a while in the sun, the plastic becomes dark and brittle. If it gets hot, it melts and deforms. Small deformations have large effects on the lenses' focusing abilities. Also, the lenses are difficult to keep clean. The ridges trap dirt.

It's a neat idea, but I think some practical experiments should be done before recommending these things to the solar cooking world.

Of late, I've been seeing some glitches in the editor while I've been making edits to the Parabolic Solar Reflectors page. I've been able to work around them until just now, when the section headings in the article have somehow got messed up, so they don't appear in the table of contents. I haven't found a way to fix this.

Can you give it a strong kick in the appropriate place?

On a related topic, is there any way to exit the editor without publishing an edit? Sometimes, when I'm experimenting with formats, I decide that I'm not making improvements, so I'd like just to cancel what I've been doing and leave the article as it was before I started. In Wikipedia and other sites, there's a "Cancel" button that I can click on to do this, but I haven't found such a thing here. Am I missing something? If there isn't such a button, could one be added?

Hi, David. Can you send me a link to exactly where this error is appearing (or send pasted text?). To exit the article and throw away your changes, just click the Back button. You will see a pop-up where you can choose "Leave this page." Thanks for your edits!

Ok. Here's a chunk of text I just copied from the article. This is *not* copied from the editor. It's from the article as it appears when I try to read it.. It's from near the top of the article, just above the table of contents.

One disadvantage of a parabolic reflector is that the solar energy is concentrated in a very small area, too small to be desirable for most cooking purposes. Moreover, this area moves quickly across the cooking container, unless the parabola is adjusted frequently. Parabolas with focal lengths of 1 to 3 meters (3 to 10 feet) are most useful for solar cooking. The focal length is the distance from the center of the parabolic surface to the focus. The solar image diameter is about 1/120 the focal length. For focal lengths in the range above, the image of the sun will be 8 to 25 mm (1/3 to 1 inch). As the earth rotates, the image moves 87 to 260 mm (10 image diameters) in 20 minutes.

==Rigid Parabolas==

Under this category, three major types have been identified:

Note that the section title "Rigid parabolas" is not shown as a title. The "==" before and after it should make it appear as a title, but this isn't happening. Also, this title is not appearing in the table of contents.

There are several other titles further down the article where the same thing is happening. Also, the spacing between lines is often wrong.

This problem suddently appeared this afternoon. Previously, these titles and spaces were displayed properly.

Previously, I had problems when I was editing something and tried to go into "source" mode. A pop-up appeared saying that I had made edits and not saved them, which was not true. I managed to work around this by exiting from the editor and going back in. For some reason, it worked ok the second time.

Occam's Razor suggests that there is just one thing wrong that is causing all the problems. I hope this is true!

But how did it get to be on a different line? It wasn't originally. As seen on my screen, it wasn't on a different line even after the problem appeared.

Actually, the line arangement of the whole article is thoroughly messed up. Lots of big blank spaces have appeared. Several other headings, such as "Scheffler Cookers", still appear wih equals signs, which appear to me to be on one line.

Maybe we should just go back to a previous version of the article, prior to the edits I made yesterday. Can I do that? I'm sure you can.

I rolled the page back to your earlier version. You can still see your changes by following this link. You'll see your changes in red on the left. Tom Sponheim 22:17, January 9, 2012 (UTC)

Hi Tom:

You didn't go back quite far enough. I managed to go back one step further, and saved a version which looks just fine. So the article is now in good shape, as far as I can see. The edit I did after this version was originally saved was just a trivial cosmetic thing. I'm not going to invite trouble by trying to do it again!

Actually, I'm leery of doing any more edits on this article, unless something new crops up. I feel like I'm walking in a minefield. The article in its present form is pretty good, I think. I'll just leave it as it is.

I'll probably come back to it someday, but at present I have a strong impression that there's a bug somewhere which I'd prefer not to encounter again. When I "published" the current version of the article yesterday, the result was a mess. I managed to go back and published the exact same version again, and this time the result looked fine. What was different? I have no idea.

Do you have any way of counting how many people read articles like this? An awful lot of the information in it is very old, dating back to the 1980s or earlier, and can't have much relevance now. Also, a lot of it reflects Indian cultural priorities, heaping praise on individual people in a way that we wouldn't do in the West, and making me feel quite uncomfortable. I don't know how other readers feel about it.

Thanks for getting rid of that "Solar ca" category I accidentally created.

You've probably noticed that I've edited the "Appropedia" page to include more information. I do quite a lot of writing for Appropedia, Wikipedia, and here. Sometimes, I find myself writing the same thing three times. It's better, I think, to have cross-links between these wikis, to avoid unnecessary duplication. Making users here aware of the existence of Appropedia should be helpful for everyone.

Just for fun, I tried looking at the automatic translations of the Parabolic solar reflectors page into other languages. I'm reasonably fluent in Spanish and French, so I wondered if the translations into these languages would make sense to me.

They're not bad, as far as they go, but they are incomplete! Part-way through the article, each translation switches into English. The rest of the article is not translated.

Maybe the translator can't cope with an article that long. Maybe it's a setting that could be adjusted.

I don't know of any way to adust how much Google translates. I'll do a test and see if Bing translates more of the article. I agree that the translations are pretty darn good at least for French and Spanish. I remember the Dutch and German being much rougher though.

Eventually we're hoping to make the Compendium articles somewhat shorter. We want to take out the long lists of individual cookers and make each of these articles contain good general information (like you have been adding) while still linking to individual pages about the various cookers. This should get around the partial translation problem. Thanks again for great contributions to the site.

Yes. I agree that the article should be substantially shortened. At its present length, it not only causes problems with the translator, it is also extremely slow to load, and difficult to read. Much of the material ia long out of date and nowadays essentially useless. I have thought of deleting some of this old stuff, but haven't done so since the people who contributed it are still around and might be upset. Maybe they should be gently encouraged to clean up and update their contributions.

i am a manufacturer of solar cooker. I just added the image of the cooker i manufacture in Cooker manufacturer - India list. But how do i add my company name in the list of manufactures and link the image with the company page to describe the feature etc of the cooker.

There's still a problem with the Solar calculations page. As you see, the name keeps coming up in red. Clicking on it leads to an editing page with no content. On the other hand, typing "Solar calculations" into the "Search This Wiki" window at the top-right corner works just fine.

I don't often scan down to the very bottom of the Parabolic solar reflectors page, so I've only today noticed that some images are missing, just above the "Quick notes" title. I guess they could have been missing for a while.

I don't think they're any great loss. They didn't add much to the article. But since they're gone. I guess their titles should be deleted too.

I just left a message with the events e-mail address paul@solarcookers.org... I'm copying this to you as well.

My goal was to triple the number of people I speak to, demonstrate cooking in front of and more this year.... Solar cooking makes as much sense to me as riding a bicycle locally, its smart.

Anyway, here is the copy...

If interested in attending a hands on solar cooking build class, Ben Brown, will be offering solar cooker builds and demonstrations with the, Solar Cooking in Michigan Program, via EarthApprentice and partners this summer.

I notice that you (or whoever) deleted a lot of my uses of "scriptstyle". Were these the cause of the problem? I like scriptstyle. It looks nicer than simple math. I have used it a lot, both here and elsewhere, and have never previously seen any difficulty with it. But if it causes problems, please let me know and I will avoid it in future.

You may not be aware that some ferocious editing has recently been done (and may still be being done) to the "Solar Cooker" page on Wikipedia. A lot of good stuff has been deleted, including all references to SCIN. It appears that a hyper-zealous editor has decided the SCIN is a commercial organization, so anything that refers to it is spam. This editor, who calls him/herself "Cantaloupe2", obviously thinks he has improved the page. Actually, in my view, he has wrecked it.

I think it might be useful if you were to write a new page in Wikipedia about Solar Cookers International Network, emphasizing its non-commercial nature. Then, if melon-head permits the new page to continue to exist, maybe we could re-introduce some of the deleted material to the Solar Cooker page, with lots of links to the new page. Just possibly, this may keep Cantaloupe2 at bay. Possibly...

In researching solar cookers, I see a lot about CooKit. I don't want to reinvent the wheel, so I am interested in this. I leave in 2 weeks for Kenya where I hope to be influential in promoting solar cooking. One person in Mexico used a car windshield shade - the kind that has a reflective side - and just curling it so that it focuses the energy. I have tried that and find that there is some good energy produced, but the shades are not available in Kenya. I keep seeing reference to the CooKit and figure it must be a proven design. I would love to know if it can be used to cook ugali - a staple food in Kenya. I am told if it can't there is not as much use for it.

Does anybody have that kind of information? Can the CooKit be used for ugali?

I used to use the browser Internet Explorer 8 on this wiki. It used to work just fine. However, recently I have not been able to make it work. On the Parabolic solar reflectors page, for example, all the graphics are missing, the list of recent changes does not load, and the editor also does not load.

I thought these problems were some new bug in the wiki. However, I recently found that everything works fine if I use Google Chrome. For some reason, SCInet works on some browsers, but not others, and this is a recent phenomenon.

I am sure that a lot of users of this wiki use older browsers, and may now be unable to access it properly, and probably don't know why.

I haven't heard from you, so I just wanted to be sure that you got my email on May 5, about the end of the ad-free wikis program. I have cancelled the payments, and added an extra free month, which means that ads will be returning on June 17

I'm sorry if the email didn't get to you, and I'm sorry the program has had to end. Regards -- sannse(help forum | blog) 22:47, June 2, 2014 (UTC)

Hi Tom, the ads are due to go back on again this week. I'm a bit worried about the effects on your main page... it may need a tweak. Using main page column tags would help a lot - that ensures that the top ad doesn't clash with anything. You may also need to move your narrow column to the right instead of the left.

I can do those changes for you before turning the ads back on, if that would help? Or I could arrange for a more extensive re-do of the main page for you. Our Community Development team could make you something that would work with the ads and give you a fresh look too. Just let me know if you want this option

Thank you for your concern. The notice of the return of the ads has been quite a trauma for our group and we appreciate your taking the time to contact us personally. Our site seeks to solve one of the major problems facing the planet at this time, and it is such a shame to have to mix ads of all kinds into that mission. Please go ahead and make the minor changes that you mention. We can take it from there. Again, thank you. Tom Sponheim (talk) 05:16, June 24, 2014 (UTC)

Hi Tom

I understand the consternation, and if there is anything I can do in the future to improve the situation, I will do my best. But for now, I've made the tweaks to the main page, and am happy to do more (or to get more expert help to do some extra work on it) if that helps at any time

If you have feedback or complaints on specific ads, you can find a section for that on the contact form. And please don't hesitate to let me know if I can help further in any other way -- sannse(help forum | blog) 17:51, June 24, 2014 (UTC)

(Willard.taylor.77 (talk) 16:13, July 25, 2014 (UTC))I AM NEW TO COMPUTORS PLEASE CONTACT ME biodivomar@gmail.com i am having difficulty contacting anyone who can help me with info to get started promoting almost nonexistent solar cooking in the dominican republic thankyouWillard.taylor.77 (talk) 16:13, July 25, 2014 (UTC)

My name is Greg Brabander, collector of all things mid-century modern vintage. The closer to the fringe these vintage items are, the better. If it is usually considered to be exoctic (including exoctica but nowhere close to being limited to) or possibly an exocticly cool thing a person might own, I do my best to acquire such items because I find them interesting, fascinating, and most often and above all, beautiful.

One of my beatifully exotic finds about 25 years ago at the Goldenwest Swap Meet in Huntington Beach, CA, is an Umbroiler, complete, and unused in the box. I'm almost positive I paid $5 for it back around 1990.

It seems ever since I first logged on to the internet in 1997, I would search at least once every other year for info on the Umbroiler I own. But each time I would come up empty, until now!

I write not to sell the Umbroiler, but to gain more info on it. I love my Umbroiler, but I will never ever use it. It is clean and perfect the way it is. And without a doubt, one of my more bizarre prized possesions :-) And since I have never been able to find out any in depth information on the Umbroiler, I can not help but wonder how many more are out there? If it is very few, my Umbroiler may be worth a small fortune, but I kind of doubt it. One thing for sure, it IS a museum piece. The Umbroiler itself is pretty much flawless. And the box is complete and intact with a few small tears. Unfortunately a couple of the instruction sheets are damaged. 2 out of 3 instruction sheets included (the instruction sheets located on the underside of the box lid) are completely faded. The sheet in the middle (#2 of 3) looks fine, with only minimal fading. At least they aren't a total loss.

On the off chance you may know someone with the instructions that I might be allowed to copy, I truly would appreciate that. And if you are a busy man, please take your time to respond. I am in no hurry whatsoever. I have waited this long, I think I can wait a little bit longer. So when you find the time, if you are able to shed some additional light on mainly how many are left, what they are worth, and or whether the Umbroiler I own should be donated to a museum, and if so, who? Any additional information you could share would greatly be appreciated. I look forward to learning more about this funky item I have owned and marveled at for all these years :-)

Greg Brabander

PS I don't have my camera with me. But when I do have it back, I will be sure to share pictures of my Umbroiler. What will be very noticeable is how much different my umbroiler looks to the picture on this website of a person placing bacon on an Umbroiler. The umbroiler in the picture appears to be made of a much sturdier material, possibly polished solid metal plates to make up the umbrella surface. Mine is more like foil lined Levi's. And the grill in the picture has a lip around the edge. Not here, just a flat grate. You shall see soon.

Hi Tom,
How do I sign in when I do not know my user name? I put in Berta Nelson and bertanelson and neither is recognized so I cannot create a password. Please help. Thanks.